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First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph 1986
Published in Penguin Books 1987
Reissued in this edition 2012
Copyright © Spike Milligan Productions Ltd, 1986
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-24-196620-4
Foreword
ROME
PADUA
VENICE
PADUA AGAIN
VENICE AGAIN
MESTRE
TRIESTE
KRUMPENDORF
GRAZ
VIENNA
PADUA YET AGAIN
ROME AGAIN
NAPLES
CAPRI
NAPLES AGAIN
ROME YET AGAIN
PENGUIN BOOKS
Spike Milligan was one of the greatest and most influential comedians of the twentieth century. Born in India in 1918, he was educated in India and England before joining the Royal Artillery at the start of the Second World War and serving in North Africa and Italy. At the end of the war, he forged a career as a jazz musician, sketch-show writer and performer, touring Europe with the Bill Hall Trio and the Ann Lenner Trio, before joining forces with, among others, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, to create the legendary Goon Show. Broadcast on BBC Radio, the ten series of the Goon Show ran from 1951 until 1960 and brought Spike to international fame, as well as to the edge of sanity and the break-up of his first marriage. He had subsequent success as a stage and film actor, as the author of over eighty books of fiction, memoir, poetry, plays, cartoons and children’s stories, and with his long-running one-man show. In 1992 he was made a CBE and in 2001 an honorary KBE, and in 2000 and 2001 he received two Lifetime Achievement Awards for writing and for comedy. He died in 2002.
To Jennie Davies, for her help
The view we left behind! From my bedroom window, showing the now dormant Mount Vesuvius
Find a Place – Stop the Clock
Sitting here at the typewriter, stop the clock. When I think of the kind of human being I was then, I can’t believe that it was me. I was twenty-eight, with the best years of my life spent in the Army. I had found the transformation from civilian life painless: it allowed freedoms I hadn’t had before. No longer did I have my mother’s dictatorship about going to mass – we had unending rows over it, in fact I left home for a time. No longer did I have that voice on the landing when I came home at night, ‘Is that you, Terry? What time do you call this?’ type rows. I had always given my mother my entire wage packet, £5.00. In return, I got half-a-crown pocket money at the age of twenty-one. Now I kept all my pay, came in late and didn’t have to go to mass. It was freedom! I was living for the moment. If there was any future, it was the next band job. I loved being there, playing the trumpet, me the music maker, me being asked by officers, ‘I say, Milligan, can you play such and such a tune?’, me singing, flirting with the girls. Now here I was in Italy on £10.00 a week with officer status, playing with a trio that I thought would bring us fame and fortune, and all this and a pretty ballerina. This was Italy, the sun shone, free of all responsibilities except the show, free all day. Oh, life was good! One day that would all end.
Spike Milligan
Monkenhurst
1 May 1986
Maria Antoinetta Fontana
The charabanc, with its precious cargo of bisexual soldier artistes, see-saws through the narrow Neapolitan streets. It is a day of high summer. We pull up at our destination, the Albergo Rabacino. The sunlight plays on its golden baroque chiselled façade. Lieutenant Ronnie Priest hurries into its mahogany portals, only to return downcast of visage. ‘The bloody girls will be a while; they’ve just got back from mass.’ He lights up a cigarette. ‘Bloody females,’ he adds. We all debouch to stretch our legs and other parts. Immediately, we are set on by street vendors. I was taken up with a tray of chrome and gilt watches – I needed a watch badly, a good heavy one that would stop me being blown away. As we barter, the Italian Corps de Ballet usher forth with their luggage. Our balding driver, Luigi, is rupturing himself stowing the bulging cases into the rear locker – all this while I have just clinched a deal for a watch that looks like a burnished gold Aztec altar, a huge lump of a thing. On me, it made my wrist look like an Oxfam appeal for food. I had bargained the price down from ten million lire to seven thousand and the vendor was running away at full speed while counting the money. I was winding it when a female voice diverted me: ‘ ’Ow much you payer for that?’ I turned to see a petite, mousy-haired, blue-eyed, doll-like girl.
The first clash of eyes was enough. It was, no, not love at first sight – that came later – but it most certainly was something at first sight. (Darling, I feel in something at first sight.)
‘I paid seven thousand lire.’
She ‘tsu-tsu-tsued’ and shook her head. ‘You know all watch stolen.’ No, I didn’t know that. ‘Let me see,’ she said, in a semi-commanding voice. She examined the watch. ‘Maybe, yes,’ she said, returning it.
I said it was a very good watch, it told the time in Italian as well as English. What was her name?
‘My namer is Maria Antoinetta Fontana, but everyone call me Toni.’
‘I’m Spike,’ sometimes known as stop thief or hey you!
‘Yeser, I know.’ She had found my name on the programme and had obviously set her sights on me. I would make good target practice. Maria Antoinetta Fontana was understudy for the première ballerina at the Royal Opera House in Rome. From now on, it was goodbye Bing Crosby, lead soldiers and Mars bars. She was so petite! Five feet four inches! We are ‘all aboarding’ the Charabong, I notice that Toni has lovely legs and the right amount, two. I tried to sit next to her, but in the mêlée I ended up in the seat behind her as Riccy Trowler, our crooner, had fancied her and beat me to it. If he looked at her, I would kill. Do you hear me? KILL! Didn’t he know with me around he hadn’t a chance! Me, the Brockley Adonis? Poor blind little fool. Me, the Harry James of St Cyprian’s Hall, SE 26! ‘Hold very tight and fares please,’ says Lieutenant Priest in mock cockney bus conductor tones as we set off for the Holy City.
The journey passes with Toni turning to cast me eye-crippling glances. She dangles her hand in the lee of her seat for me to hold. Arghhhhhhhhh! It’s small, sensuous, soft and perfumed. It’s giddy-making. Oh, but how lovely!!! I’m falling, falling, falling! and no safety net!
Mulgrew’s keen Scottish eye has noticed my new watch. He assesses it and says, ‘That’s the sort of present a mean millionaire would buy for a blind son.’ He asks how much. I tell him. He bursts out laughing. Laugh he may, in a year’s time that selfsame watch would save him and the Bill Hall Trio from ruin. Of that, more in my next book! Bill Hall is killing the boredom by playing his fiddle. I join in on the guitar. We play some jazz and a few Neapolitan melodies, ‘Cuore Napolitano’, ‘Non Me Scorde’, ‘Ah Zaz Zaz Za’.
Ceprano is a halfway halt. We are taken to a large NAAFI where we are given lunch. Ahhhhhhhgghhhh, Cold Collation!!! The most dreaded meal in the English Culinary calendar: the dead chicken, the dead lettuce, the watery mayonnaise, the lone tomato ring! It’s the sort of meal you leave in your will to your mother-in-law.
Clowning at a wayside break. Toni (left) feeds Jimmy Molloy (centre) and Riccy Trowler (right)
The Bill Trio in a now derelict prisoner-of-war cage, trying desperately to be funny en route to Rome, where the Pope lives
‘You no lak,’ says Toni who is sitting opposite.
‘No, I no lak,’ I said.
‘Can I have you chicken?’ she says, her head inclined to one side. I watch as the dead fowl disappears through her delectable lips. I sip the red tannic-acid-ridden tea that must have been put on to boil the day after we all landed at Salerno.
Toni and I saunter out to the Charabong, the journey continues. The swine Trowler assumes his seat next to my Toni, the blind fool. Hasn’t he noticed her adoring glances?? My matchless profile from Brockley S E 26?
Bill Hall is laughing, I’ve told him the price of the watch. So far Bornheim has passed the journey immersed in the Union Jack newspaper. He walks down the Charabong, swaying and bumping. He makes reference to my new amour.
‘Is there something going on?’ he said, nodding towards my Toni.
I told him most certainly there was a lot going on. I had met her, according to my new watch, at ten-thirty precisely. Yes, there was a lot going on but as conditions improved I’d hoped for a lot coming off. He grins like a fiend.
‘The poor girl,’ he said. ‘You’d better not show it to her all at once.’
He slunk away chuckling, the swine! This was not that kind of affair, this was true romance. No tawdry thoughts entered my head, but they were entering other areas. South of Rome we lumber through hot dusty villages, the grapes are heavy on the vine and on sale are large luscious red bunches for a few lire. But I don’t have eyes for the delights of the Campagna, only Toni’s glances and the squeeze of her little hand.
Late evening and the dusty chugging Charabong enters Rome through the Porta Maggiore. It’s a Sunday evening and the sunlight is turning to rose-petal pink. The streets are full of the populace taking their evening strolls – elegant Romans are really elegant, they wear clothes well. But! None of them are wearing sensible brown English shoes like me. More of them later. The Charabong comes to rest outside the Albergo Universo. I’ll help Toni with her luggage to her bedroom. Her mother wants her to go home, but, because she wants to be near me, lies, and tells Momma the company rules insist she stays at the hotel. Ha! Ha! Love finds a way.
I take me to my chamber – a very nice no-nonsense double bedroom. Thank God, this time there’s no screaming, chattering, farting Secombe. No, he’s in his hammock and a thousand miles away. Instead, I have Wino of the Year, Trooper Mulgrew, J., who by just throwing his kit down can make the room look like the Wandsworth Municipal Rubbish Tip. I hang up my civvies.
‘This is the life, Johnny,’ I say.
‘Oh, you’ve noticed,’ he says.
To activate his Scottish mind, I say, ‘I wonder what your folks in Glasgow are doing?’
And he says, ‘A bank.’ He’s looking at the ceiling, there’s nothing there to tax his tartan mind. ‘What’s the time?’ he says.
And I say, ‘It’s time you bought a watch that I can laugh at.’
From our floor we take the lift.
‘Che piano?’ says the ageing lift attendant.
‘La terra piano,’ says Mulgrew which translated means ‘the earth floor’.
The dining-room is full. Another ENSA party has booked in, among them Tony Fayne who in post-war years would become well known for his partnership with David Evans. As Fayne and Evans, they did funny sporting commentaries and were used by the BBC till it had sucked them dry and discarded them. I noticed that this new intake all wore their shirts outside their trousers. This struck me as amusing because, dear reader, during my boyhood days in India we, the Raj, laughed at the ‘wogs’ for that selfsame reason. What I didn’t know is that this was the ‘latest fashion’ from America! Suddenly, tucking shirts in was old-fashioned. I remember whenever Tony Fayne passed me there was the faint aroma of marijuana, for which he was later ‘busted’! I remember one dinner-time, when the smell of pot emanated from their table as I passed it on my way to bed, a pale ENSA female of some forty summers grabbed the seat of my trousers and whooped ‘Wot ho, Monty’ and fell face-down into the soup.
Our lesbian javelin-thrower manageress remembers me.
‘Come sta, Terri?’ she says.
We chatted over coffee. Had I any spare tickets for the show? Of course. How many? She’d like to bring the family, thirty-two. She ‘buys’ us a bottle of wine and we discuss post-war Italy – the political scene was very woolly with the Christian Democrats holding the wolf of Communism at bay. She doesn’t want Communism, she loves democracy and have we anything for sale on the black market? We repair to her private suite where we continue drinking and she shows me a photo album. There she is in all her athletic glory, throwing the javelin at the All Italia Games. Gad! In her running shorts and vest, she’s a fine figure of a man. She shows me photos of Mussolini’s execution – ghastly – then, a turn-up for the book, a picture of Clara Petacci looking very sexy in a net dress (see picture).
A knock at the door. It’s the late Bill Hall and fiddle, can he come in? His eyes fall on the Petacci photo.
‘Cor, ’oo’s the bird? Clara Petacci? Wot, the one that Musso was givin’ it to? Cor, ’ow could they shoot her, all that lovely stuff!’
He was right, she would have made a lovely stuff.
Bill has been out visiting ‘a friend’. This is usually some old boiler with a turkey trot neck, one foot in the grave and very grateful for any that’s going. He wants to know if it’s too late for dinner. The manageress says no, what’s he want? Spaghetti. We watch Bill eating it. He cuts it all up with a knife, then shovels it in on a spoon.
I retire to bed, first taking a luxurious bath. Mulgrew is already abed, smoking and sipping red wine from a glass by his bedside. ‘How did you get on with the Italian bird?’
Italian bird? If he meant Miss Toni Fontana, I was indeed much favoured by her and would see her on the morrow and be immediately hypnotized by her ‘petite beauty’. Mulgrew is given to silent evil laughter with heavy shoulders.
Clara Petacci turning on the Fascist party
‘Wait till she gets a look at your petite beauty.’
He was a dirty little devil and would never go to heaven.
Barbary Coast opened at the Argentina Theatre on Monday, 24 June. It was an immediate success and the Bill Hall Trio again the hit of the show. Wait till England heard about us, rich, rich, rich!!!
It’s a busy show for me: I have to appear in sketches, in the Bowery Quartette singing ‘Close the Shutters, Willy’s Dead’, play trumpet in the orchestra and the guitar in the Bill Hall Trio – all at no extra charge. Bornheim has a dastardly trick. During my solo in ‘Close the Shutters’, he drops a lone ping-pong ball that bounces slowly and repeatedly and faster into the orchestra pit, where he has arranged for a man to drop a brick into a bucket of water. It was a simple but funny idea.
The Bill Hall Trio on stage in Rome, where the Pope lives
The programme of the Barbary Coast opening night, Rome, where the Pope lives
The Barbary Coast Quarlet – left to right, Milligan, Bornheim, Trowler, Escott.
Of others in the show, the lead comic was Jimmy Molloy, about forty, overweight, a cockney, very left wing, his comedy all aggressive. After the war not a word was heard of him in the profession, so … There’s one born every minute and we had one who was, Sergeant Chalky White, ex-Marine Para Commando. What he was doing in the entertainment world was as baffling as finding Adolf Eichmann in the Israeli government. His only claim to fame was he once leapt off Bari Bridge into the harbour with an umbrella – all very clever, but there’s a limit to how many times. He was a bouncing all-noise cockney boy: if you were in a pub with him, you all had to sing and do ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’. He had a brain that would have fitted into a thimble with room to spare. He was i/c transport and scenery, both of which strained his mental capacities to the limit. Yes, he was a nice bouncing thirty-year-old cockney lad who should have stayed on his barrow. However, he was turned on by the bright lights and birds of show biz, so he wheedled his way into the show. He couldn’t act, he couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, but he could fight … So, for no reason at all, in the middle of the show a mock fight breaks out and we all have to pretend to be floored by Sergeant White.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t ’urt yer, I’ll miss you by a whisker.’
This didn’t work out. Every night he would mistime and render one of the cast unconscious. As I had boxed in the past, I rode his punches. Even then, to this day I have a chipped front tooth and a scarred inner lip. Finally, after we’d all been hit, Lieutenant Priest had to put a stop to the ‘Fight’. White sulked off.
‘It’s professional jealousy,’ he said.
White truly believed that after the war he would ‘become someone’. He did, a dustman.
Maxie – just Maxie – was a short, squat mid-European. A huge head dwarfed his body and his neck didn’t exist, so much so that he couldn’t turn his head but had to revolve his whole body. He spoke very little English. His ‘act’ consisted of bending iron bars on his head and shoulders, concluding with his bending an iron bar on his forearm.
‘Maxie has developed this special muscle that “no living human has developed”. In this attempt, if he misses the muscle he could break his arm,’ announced Molloy.
There followed great grunts and thwacks as the sweating strong man beat the shit out of himself, finally holding up the now bent bar and collapsing into the wings.
On the day she visited her mother, Toni arranged to meet me in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. There, we would have tea. I was walking on air! Our budding romance was the talk of the company.
‘We will meeta under theee statue of Goethe,’ she had said smilingly.
Of course, Frederick von Goethe the well-known German singer dancer! I wore my dark blue trousers, white silk shirt, satin blue tie, navy blue velvet jacket and my sensible strong brown outsized convulsed English shoes. I took one of Rome’s dying Fiat taxis. He had never heard of the statue of Frederick von Goethe, singer and dancer, but we kept driving till we found it.
I arrived early as I wished to choose a suitable pose to strike for when Toni arrived. I chose a Spanish oak against which I leaned like Gary Cooper and smoked a cigarette like Humphrey Bogart. By the time she arrived, I’d run out. Toni drew up in a taxi, I posed heavily as Robert Taylor. As she approached, all the juices in my metabolism started to revolve. I think I was actually vibrating: as she drew near I would appear to her as a blue blur. She was dressed in a blue polka-dot dress, her clean brown limbs glowed in the Roman sun and I was speechless in the face of her smile.
‘Buon giorno, Toni,’ I said going light-headed, only the weight of my sensible English shoes keeping me earthbound.
‘Hello Terr-ee,’ * she said and held out her hand.
My first photograph of Maria Antoinetta Fontana – the Villa Borghese gardens, Rome, where the Pope lives
I took it and she led me away.
‘Come,’ she said.
Through leafy glades she led me to a teahouse. We sat at a table, all the others were deserted, how perfect! A crisp white-coated waiter still smelling of shaving soap attended us. Would I like tea, asks Toni. Yes, I say. What kind, she says. What’s she mean what kind? Tea, there’s only one kind. Toni orders in Italian and the waiter speeds to her bidding.
‘Isn’t it a lovely day?’
Yes, Toni, and I love you.
‘The trees are at their best this time of the year.’
Yes, Toni, and I love you.
The tea arrives – ah! and Italian pastries. Good old Char. Toni watches as I mix mine with half milk, five spoons of sugar and stir it into a treacly goo. What’s that she’s drinking in a tall glass enclosed in a silver holder? There’s a lemon floating in it. Careless waiter! Shall I get it out for her? What? It’s meant to be there? Russian tea? Oh, I’m sorry I can’t speak Russian, so how should I know?
Temple of Aesculapius. ‘You have temple like that in England?’ No, I say. We have only Nat Temple and his diseased Band.
The Italian pastries are all small multicoloured fiddly things. Haven’t they any jam doughnuts or currant buns? She pours tea like a duchess, eats like a bird, picks up pastries like an angel and sits upright ballerina-style. I had met a lady.
I pay the bill. I must have tipped too heavily as the waiter clutches his heart and runs crying to the kitchen.
‘I show you nice things,’ says Toni arising. ‘Having you ever seen Temple of Aesculapius?’
No I have never seen his temple; the only Temple I’ve seen is Shirley. We walk through boulevards of roses, many a small fountain laughing in the sun. We talked, I know we talked but it was all coming to me through a long tube. I was spellbound by this girl by my side. We saw the temple and I took an amateur snapshot to enshrine the moment.
So we walk, walk, walk, talk, talk, talk. The walking involves my sensible brown English brogues. Let me describe them. At first glance they look like semi-deflated rugby balls. I have a small foot, size seven, but the shoe is size ten. The leather is convulsed, the soles are an inch thick with a rubber heel. I had bought them off a stall in Deptford. Basically, they made me look like a cripple. I wondered why people stood up for me in buses. Now Toni, elegant Toni, has noticed them. I suppose to her Italian mind they would appear to look like two giant stale salamis with shoelaces inserted. She tries to be tactful.
‘Terr-ee, why you wear you Army boots with nice clothes?’
Army boots???? What was wrong with the girl? I told her these were my best shoes and the height of fashion in England in the 7s. 6d. range. I was the talk of Deptford! She stifled a laugh with her handkerchief. She is wearing delightful feather-light Ferragamo shoes.
‘You only ’ave one pair of shoes?’
Of course, that’s all one needs – one sensible pair weighing ten pounds each.
‘You must buy one more best pair,’ she said and we left it at that. That magic afternoon wandered on and still does … We stop at a stall and have a lemonade each. We sit sipping them through straws.
Toni points to the range of cakes and confectionary, ‘You have like this in England?’
Oh, yes, I tell her, we have very good sweets in England and I reel them off: spotted dick, rice and jam, plum duff, suet and treacle pud. Oh, yes, we have sweet things. I offer her a cigarette from my Erinmore Mixture tin. No, she ‘no lak smoke’, she thinks that smoking is dangerous to one’s health. Is she mad? Smoking is lovely: all the film stars do it, smoking never hurt anyone, I said. I smoke sixty a day and am as fit as a fiddle, I said, coughing and bringing up a ton of it.
We have arrived at the Spanish Steps. The flower sellers fade into drabness among the urgently growing flowers. Red roses! of course! I buy Toni a small bouquet – I had never bought flowers for a girl before. I passed them to her, they glowed red in the afternoon sun. She took them, looking intently at me as she did. Still looking at me, she withdrew one lone rose and gave it to me. It’s a moment in time frozen in my memory. I take the rose and try to put it into my buttonhole. But there isn’t one, is there, so I stick it in my pocket. Toni giggles, it sounds like water splashing in a pond.
‘My love is like a red, red rose that blooms in early spring.’
She smiled with her eyes, ‘You write that?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one. She holds her hand out and we are off up the steps to visit the apartment of Keat’s overlooking the Piazza di Spagna. A bored sixty-year-old guide points out items of interest – Keats’s bed, his writing table, his chair, his po, etc. etc. – then holds out his hands for the Keats fund. I tip him fifty lire. He is well pleased and I am not. I want change. He tells us that Keats’s grave can be seen in the Protestant cemetery. I say, thanks, we only visit Catholic stiffs. Time for us to part, she to home to see Mother and I to the Albergo. We will meet again at the theatre that evening.
The Barbary Coast show was a sell-out again. Some brass hats and their females were introduced to the cast, among them General Tuker from the 4th Indian Div. He was delighted when I spoke to him in Hindi – even more stunning, he knew my grandfather, Trumpet Sergeant Major H. Kettleband and his wife!! That night I went straight to bed and dreamed the whole day through again, nude.
Toni and I meet at the Café Minosko on the Via Veneto. Toni wants to get me to a shoe shop to buy a pair of decent shoes. I arrive first and order.
‘Tea,’ I say. ‘Tea à la russe con lemone.’
I am quick to learn. Suddenly, as I’m sipping the new-found concoction, she draws up beside me. She, too, has Russian Tea. Tea over, she holds out her hand; I take it and follow. We walk and talk. We could have run and talked, I suppose; or, rather, Toni could have run and talked while I stood and listened. God she had lovely legs. Those lovely legs stop outside a shoe shop. In she hikes me. A totally bald fat Italian salesman with a fixed grin attends us. Tony rattles off something in Italian, during which the salesman glances in horror at my sensible English shoes. He is gone and returns with a pair of black moccasins.
‘Terr-ee,’ she smiles. ‘You try theseeeee.’
I sit while the salesman unlaces my shoes. He braces himself like a man about to neutralize an unexploded bomb. With a low moan, he eases them off and drops them to the floor with a loud Thud!
My shoes lie on their sides looking like an accident. He slips on one moccasin, then the other. I feel light-headed. I feel naked. I look in the mirror – gone are the two Frankenstein lumps at the bottom of my legs. Now, all is trim and elegant. Toni has made her first move in civilizing me.
The salesman wants to know if I want the old shoes. Yes, I say, I want to take them to Lourdes to see if there’s a cure. The change in shoes is unbelievable. I’m a stone lighter, I can cross my legs without having to lift my leg manually, dogs have stopped barking at or trying to mate with them. A small step for Spike Milligan, a giant step for mankind.
Toni wants me to meet her family. Why not? I’ve already met mine and it took to me. We sit in a café on the Via Veneto with Rome passing by. She tells me her father died at the beginning of the war, that he had owned various enterprises in Abyssinia but they had all collapsed and been impounded by the British whom he hated. The main one was a soap factory; when they closed that, he had a heart attack and died. I had been out with a girl whose father was a mechanic in Norwood, one who was a bookmaker in Crofton Park and one who was a thief in Brockley, but never a soap factory owner. Still, everything comes to he who waits. But before I meet her family, she must break the news to her ‘boyfriend’ Arturo who is an officer in the Alpine Brigade. She has already written to him saying it was finito.
‘I only know him a leetle,’ she said.
Saturday morning and I take a taxi to 53 Via Appennini. Toni meets me, smiling, at the door. Why she smiled at doors, I don’t know.
‘ ’Ello Terr-ee.’
I had dressed in my battledress with all my medal ribbons on. I wanted her to present a heroic liberator-of-her-country image to her mother. So to Mother in the lounge, a homely chintzy loose covers affair. This was the first time I’d had a loose covers affair.
Her mother is tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed and I was soon to know she was French by descent, like parachuting from the Eiffel Tower. She is very pleased to meet me as is her younger sister, Lily, who is the living image of Ingrid Bergman! The maid, Gioia, is introduced and she is a giggle of shyness. She curtsies to me.
I am to have a lunch of soup, then pasta and a fish course with a white wine – the latter must have been made from stewed guardsmen’s socks, mixed with vinegar. Apart from that, it was a delightful lunch with me acting up to Toni’s mother. I think as I was the first Allied soldier they’d met, they were all excited, including Gioia who giggled every time she served me. I tried to avoid an amorous glance to Toni so her mother didn’t worry about what was going to be a real love affair.
That night I stood in the wings and watched Toni pirouetting to Ponchielli’s ‘Dance of the Hours’. It was all so romantic. It had echoes of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, though I doubt if anyone would have judged the man with the clip-on moustache, long white nightshirt, holding a candle and singing ‘Close the Shutters, Willy’s Dead’, was the boyfriend of the stunning petite ballerina on the stage. Toni liked Johnny Mulgrew and Bill Hall but a) didn’t like Bill’s scruffy appearance and b) Mulgrew’s drinking habits. It was her fear that I, too, would become like them.
Bill Hall is still disappearing for twenty-three out of the twenty-four hours, only appearing – shagged out – minutes before the act is due on stage. Where does he go? Bornheim knows.
‘He has to hop it sharp after the show. If daylight touches him, he turns into a werewolf and raids NAAFI dustbins.’
Mulgrew shakes with silent laughter.
‘I tell yew if he did turn into a werewolf no one would notice the difference.’
Mulgrew has an evil sense of humour i.e. Hall rolls his cigarettes, so Mulgrew manages to mix magnesium powder with hall’s baccy. With blackened face and singed eyebrows, Hall walks the hotel corridors with a stick shouting ‘Orrite ’oo fuckin’ dun it.’ Worse to come, Mulgrew, who by damping brown paper had made a realistic ‘Richard’* places it in Gunner Hall’s bed with the note ‘The Phantom strikes again’.
Oh, dear! Maxie has overdone it, he thinks he has fractured his arm! I watched from the wings as it happened. Maxie, for a start, looked like Neanderthal man, his forehead was every bit of two inches and his arms reached below his knees. I think in his paybook it said ‘Place of birth: tree’.
He is telling the audience, ‘Laddies and Gintzleman, hai makada act zo, I tak dees hiron barrr and I mak bend bye hitting special muscle hin mie arm.’
Then he used to start this terrible Thwack Thwack Thwack on his forearm, mixed with grunts and occasional screams. This night, he staggers off clutching his arm and moaning Oh Fuck in Hungarian. He was off the show for weeks; I think he convalesced in a zoo.
After the show, I take Toni for a glass of wine at the trattoria next to the theatre. We sit at a table on the pavement and talk, what about? Anything, it’s just lovely being with her, looking into those eyes, at that waspish smile and listening to her small childlike voice. I am falling head over heels.
All packed up and on to the Charabong. This time, I sit next to Toni. Our destination, the ancient town of Padua. We are travelling on a Sunday morning and families are coming or going to church. The sound of church bells hangs on the morning air; we pass several religious processions.
‘One fing about Caflicks,’ says Gunner Hall. ‘They always play ter full ’ouses.’
Bornheim agrees. ‘It’s all that communion wine they swig free, that gets ’em in’ – he who hasn’t been inside a church since his christening day.
I, too, had lost touch with my religion. I had stopped going to church the moment I joined the Regiment. No more could my mother nag me into God’s presence. However, Toni was a practising Catholic. Why are they always practising? When do they become good enough not to?
When I put that to Toni, she said, ‘I don’t understand you, what are you talking about.’
I said about twenty words a minute.
She didn’t understand, but laughed and said, ‘I love you beautiful eyes.’
How strange! All those years in the Army and my sergeant never said I had beautiful eyes. ‘Beautifulll eyeeesss front!’ No, it doesn’t sound right.
We are driving across Italy from west to east. We can’t make Padua in a day; it’s some six hundred kilometres away. We stay that night in a hotel on the sea at Riccione. It’s a large rambling hotel built in the thirties, a square building built by squares for squares. The rooms are comfortable – strange I’ve never found an uncomfortable Italian bed.
We all hike ourselves off the Charabong carrying our chattels. We’re here for three nights – we do two shows starting tomorrow night. It’s only seven o’clock, a velvet starlit night is slipping overhead. I tap at Toni’s door: would she like to go for a swim? Oh, yes, it’s a warm night. Dinner is at eight, so we have time. The beach is deserted and the water soft and warm. We frolic around for a bit – all that idiot ducking and diving between her legs, etc. We run back to the lee of a fishing boat and dry off.
‘Before the war, these beach very many people,’ she says, and it wouldn’t be long before there were twice as many people as there were then.
I went back in 1965 on a nostalgia trip: you couldn’t see the sea for people and when you did see it, there was no room in it. Signs should have read ‘Sorry, Adriatic Full Up Today’.
We hold hands and lean against the boat and I kiss her for the first time … There were love whispers in the all-embracing night. We return to dinner in a nice airy room opening on to a verandah. Toni asks about the family.
‘Wot you fadder do?’
‘As little as possible. He’s a soldier, a captain.’
‘He fight in theese war?’
‘No, no, not this one. He’s too old – “vecchio”. He fight in last war, this one is an encore.’
‘And you mother? You look like her or you fadder?’
‘I think I like my father.’
‘Oh, he must be veree ’ansome,’ she laughed.
‘Yes, he was. Not so much now.’
‘You have sisters, brothers?’
‘One brother.’
‘Is he old or young?’
‘He’s younger than me, eight years.’
‘Wot he do?’
‘He’s in the Army in Germany.’
‘Before war?’ ‘Before he was studying to be an artist.’
‘You family all artist … how you say artistico?’
‘Yes, my mother was a trained singer and she played the piano. My father sing and dance.’
‘What kind dance?’
‘Tap dance.’
‘Oh, like American, Fred Astairs?’
‘Yes, Fred Astairs – a little more Bill Robinson.’
‘Who Bill Robinson?’
‘Oh dear.’
It was the sort of conversation that millions of people make when they first meet. Looking at it these forty years later, it looks boring. So, what made it worthwhile at the time? The sound of her voice? The movement of her lips? The look in her eyes and that peculiar tilt of her head when she spoke? Her hand gesturing to make a point? Yes, I suppose all those things and the unexplainable biological call of matching chemistry that takes charge of the entire you and dedicates it to another person. It’s all pretty miraculous stuff. It does wear off, but it will always haunt you – a sudden tune, a perfume, a flower, a word, and the ghost of all those yesterdays returns for a fleeting moment, like a wind’s caress. Ahhh, youth …
From the windows in the passage off our bedrooms, we can see the outdoor cinema which is showing Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in something like ‘give me some men who are stout-hearted men’, etc. etc. etc. Toni and I stand at the window for the freebie. I have my arm round her waist; it’s like an electric shock. We watch as Jeanette and Nelson shriek at each other, face to face. ‘I am thineeeeeeee, for everrrrrrr.’ It ends with them kissing on a balcony. So to bed. I kiss Toni goodnight only to be caught by Johnny Bornheim.
‘Here, here, here,’ he cautions. ‘No kissing ballerinas between six and midnight.’ He pretends to produce a notebook and pencil. ‘Now then, how many kisses and what time?’
Toni giggles and disappears into her bedroom. ‘Goodnight Terr-ee.’
Bornheim tells me he has found a grand piano in a room. Would I like to hear it? I troop down with him and he plays Puccini, Ellington and more Ellington. By then it is midnight. I hie me to my bed, my head full of flowers and Toni. Oh, those kisses, there must be a word somewhere that explains the feeling. Spazonkled! That’s it, it was like being Spazonkled, Spazonklified!! I lay in bed smoking a cigarette and steaming with love. Where will it all end?
I slept late, missed breakfast, couldn’t find Toni anywhere. She’d gone with the girls for a swim. I find an Italian café and other caffelatte and a brioche which I wolf down. Bornheim appears at the door:
‘Missed breakfast,’ he said.
‘Oh, you little Sherlock Holmes,’ I said.
‘Not with Toni?’ he went on.
‘No, not with Toni. Very good, very observant.’
He settles down to a coffee. ‘Seen the theatre?’
No, I hadn’t.
‘Very nice, small but very nice. Called La Galleria. Been for a swim yet?’
‘Yes, last night with Toni.’
‘Ohhhhhh, you dirty devil! Midnight swims, eh???’
Bornheim doesn’t understand the purity of this romance.
‘When you going to give it to her,’ he says, and I shudder.
I’m above all this. I’m no longer lecherous Gunner Milligan but nice Terri Milligan.
Bill Hall thinks we need to practise and think of some new ideas. So we retire to my room for two hours, play those jazz standards I still love, ‘Georgia Brown’, ‘Poor Butterfly’, ‘What’s New’, ‘Sophisticated Lady’. We get carried away and the practice becomes a swing session, lovely.
The show that night as per usual, with glances between Toni and me whenever we passed as we rushed to change for the next scene. It’s a very warm night and the smell of frangipani is wafting through the window of our dressing-room – all very nice. Taiola Silenzi, a name to conjure with: she is our monumental Italian soprano. She and her smaller husband Fulvio Pazzaglia sing excerpts from opera and popular ballads – ‘Violetta’, etc. Taiola is in her early forties and must have been very pretty in her day. Alas, I wasn’t in town that day. She is overweight but insists on wearing skin-tight clothes. Layers of fat poke all over the place as though she is wearing a series of bicycle inner tubes. She is not far off looking like a Michelin man. She’s billed as Frisco Lil and with that name launches into ‘One Fine Day’. Tonight, as she and Fulvio are going for one of those last high screaming notes, her dress rips across her abdomen with resultant raw soldier laughter from the audience. She is furious and storms off into her dressing-room where we can hear her yelling at her innocent little husband. She was so loud in her protestations that during the Bill Hall Trio act we could hear her ranting on, to which Bill Hall yells ‘Silencio!’ Which got more laughter.